Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science: Explaining Patterns of Regulatory Enforcement

这篇博士论文研究支持项目关注的是政府职业安全监管的执行模式。该项目开发和测试了一种解释职业安全和健康管理局(OSHA)如何与州机构合作执行《职业安全和健康法》的理论。该项目的中心目标是促进政治学方面的知识状况，了解合规方面的不确定性如何改变法律的执行方式。该项目通过以下方式做到这一点：1)制定反映战略决策的执法程序；2)根据容易观察到的政策产出，对执法人员采用评价程序。这些惯例和程序直接决定监管结果，并进一步制约寻求影响政策结果的强大集团的成功。检验这些理论涉及审查在整个执行过程中如何处理个别案件。因此，已经构建了一个数据集，通过区分检查目标、惩罚施加以及惩罚后谈判和诉讼来分解OSHAct的执行过程。该数据集包括受OSHAct监管的所有私人设施的信息，使调查员能够诊断被过滤到执法过程中的设施的处理情况，以及那些完全避免检查的设施。此外，通过获得关于个别设施实际安全状况的信息(甚至连OSHA自己的外地办事处都无法获得的信息)，调查员可以比较“类似”设施在执法过程的不同阶段、在不同程度的合规不确定性下以及在各种群体影响环境中的处理情况。这些数据是通过对职业安全局和国家机构外地办事处的抽样调查人员的访谈来收集的。

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project focuses on patterns of enforcement in government regulation of occupational safety. The project develops and tests a theory that explains how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in cooperation with state agencies, enforces the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The project's central aim is to advance the state of knowledge in political science on the way in which uncertainty about compliance alters how the law is enforced. The project does so by showing how uncertainty about compliance leads to 1) the development of enforcement routines that reflect strategic decision-making and 2) the adoption of evaluative procedures for enforcement personnel based on easily observed policy outputs. These routines and procedures directly determine regulatory outcomes and further condition the success of powerful groups seeking to influence policy outcomes.Testing the theories involves an examination of how individual cases are treated throughout the enforcement process. Therefore, a data set has been constructed that disaggregates the OSHAct enforcement process by distinguishing inspection targeting, penalty imposition, and post-penalty negotiation and litigation. This data set includes information about all private facilities subject to OSHAct regulation, allowing the investigator to diagnose both the treatment of facilities that are filtered into the enforcement process and those facilities that avoid inspection altogether. Furthermore, with access to information about actual safety conditions at individual facilities (information that is not available even to OSHA's own field offices), the investigator can compare the treatment of "similar" facilities in different stages of the enforcement process, under different levels of uncertainty about compliance, and in a variety of group influence environments. The data are collected through interviews with personnel in a sample of OSH and state agency field offices.